Performances

So I thought that class was pretty intense, and it made me think of one storythat I carry around and think about on a not infrequent basis.

When I was just out of grad school, I got my first professional position as a college administrator and my supervisor was a women of color. I loved this woman; she was brilliant and beautiful and the kind of colleague I aspired to be. One day during a 1:1 supervision meeting she confronted me about my work performance, and in particular, about time i had taken to support some family members through a tough time. She talked about how important it was for me to be committed, and to be an adult now, and that as an adult, I needed to prioritize my professional commitments sometimes over my need to be present for my family. This was after a conversation about how a colleague whose contract had been started at a higher pay rate had a family, children that she needed to support, but the fact that I financially supported my grandparents and the children of one of my younger teenage cousins didn't merit a similar increase.
She was really well-intended, but so firmly steeped in her own definitions of what constituted family, what it meant to be an "adult," what is professional or not professional, that my definitions weren't allowed equal status. They weren't culturally situated, they were less than: un-professional, un-adult, un-committed, un-familied. (okay, that last one i made up, but the language isn't working for me here.)
Alongside all of that: I really would have preferred her to be White. I would have been more prepared, less surprised by her perception. And quite frankly, I would have felt comfortable confronting her. Probably not effectively, but nonetheless...As a woman of color, though, I thought about the sacrifices that I KNEW she had made in the course of making her journey up the administrative ranks, and I was familiar with the fact that she had made sense of those in the same terms she had used with me. When she didn't make it home to her family's celebration of the Easter Holiday, she comforted herself with the fact that she made the "right" professional decision. The hard decision. And then she confronted me in our 1:1, lovingly, compassionately, thinking only about how to prepare me for professional culture and its obstacles, wanting me to learn and to do well, and believing that her experience and her choices were right not just for her but for anyone/everyone.
I wonder about the damage I have inflicted when I have been convinced that my experience is a universal one, that my learnings have meaning for others, and that I knew exactly what their right answer was, rather than some ways they might go about discovering it for themselves.